IIW2007B is underway. I flew to San Jose with two of my grad students, Bryant Cutler and Devlin Daley this morning. We went to Costco to buy food for snacks and showed up at the Computer History Museum about noon.

The first day of IIW continues to evolve. Kaliya and her design team set out an agenda this time that included a set of parallel tracks to start off. The parallel tracks allowed us to run a real "intro" track for new comers alongside some working groups sessions.

I was in charge of the intro track. Paul Madsen started off with a talk introducing the major protocols and their relationship to each other. I think it hit the nail on the head in terms of what I wanted from that portion of the program. I'll post a link to his files in this spot when they're available.

I gave a talk that attempted to categorize the various protocols, software projects, working groups, interop projects and industry consortia. My slides are available (PDF).

The session ended with two talks on topics I think will be emerging themes at this IIW: VRM and Trust/Reputation. Doc Searls gave a nice impromptu talk on vendor relationship management. At Defrag, Dick Hardt gave a great talk, in his inimitable style on trust and reputation. I asked him to repeat it at IIW.

We'll be having a general session at 4pm and then dinner later tonight. Tomorrow we will jump into open space and let every one define their own topics.